A group called Unsilenced Majority, founded by Mike Davis, a former staffer for the Senate Judiciary Committee under Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), is fighting back against corporate cancel culture. Many people who work for big corporations that go “woke,” such as Coke or Gillette, report feeling they’re being forced to adhere to woke culture or face canceling, firing, or public sanction. Unsilenced Majority aims to change that. Fox News reports:
“These corporations go woke because they have pressure from shareholders, they have pressure from the liberal media, they have pressure internally from within,” said Davis. “What we want to do at Unsilenced Majority is to provide a counterbalance. And so these corporations understand that if they go woke there’s gonna be consequences from everyday Americans.”
For many years, the left has used targeted boycott campaigns against whoever they want to silence. Rush Limbaugh once famously discovered that the campaign to make his advertisers cancel him was led by no more than ten people using fake accounts and AI technology to fabricate public outrage that did not exist.
These tactics are well known. Reporter Sharyl Attkisson once gave a great Ted Talk about astroturfing.
Astroturf is when political, corporate, or other special interests disguise themselves and publish blogs, start Facebook and Twitter accounts, publish ads, or letters to the editor, or simply post comments online to try to fool you into thinking that an independent or grassroots movement is speaking. The whole point of astroturf is to try to give the impression there’s widespread support for or against an agenda when there’s not. Astroturf seeks to manipulate you into changing your opinion by making you feel like you’re an outlier when you’re not.
Even Alec Baldwin appears to be sick of cancel culture—but only because his wife got involved in an embarrassing scandal where she pretended to be from Spain and even faked an accent. Whatever it took, it’s good that some of these people are waking up to the destructive nature of “canceling.” However, Baldwin still thinks some people are “deserving” of it, proving he didn’t learn anything at all from Senorita “Hilaria’s” turn on the merry-go-round.
Cancel culture is like a forest fire in constant need of fuel. Functioning objectively. No prejudice. No code.
Just destroy. The deserving and the undeserving alike.— AlecBaldwin (@AlecBaldwln____) May 14, 2021
But Davis doesn’t think that anyone deserves it and rightly so. He thinks everyone should be free to say whatever they want in America. After all, this is not North Korea, a fact I find myself repeating almost every day. I’m not sure if it’s to remind you or reassure myself that what we are witnessing every day in every corner of American life is not normal and not okay. We’re all hurtling towards something really bad and no one seems to know how to stop it.
Can Davis’s new organization help? Who knows? But I appreciate his willingness to try.
Davis said that among Unsilenced Majority’s tactics will be getting Americans to contact elected officials, corporations and others who engage in cancel culture and to pressure them to not go that route.
Unsilenced Majority’s website says it will focus on “free expression without fear of retribution,” “worker firings,” “cancel culture in education” and “corporate wokeism.”
Getting Americans to do anything like contacting their representatives is an uphill battle. Most people only care when it affects them directly. There are millions of people who will sit on their couches and tell the few of us toiling away in the battle what we should be doing, but asking them to actively participate and help out…that’s a whole other story without a happy ending.
Cancel culture will end when the cancelers get canceled. The game will suddenly be a lot less fun when everyone is terrified to speak out about anything. Of course, by that time, we will probably be living in North Korea (American Edition) and it will be too late.
The problem is that the general populace has been brainwashed to believe that it’s okay to silence certain people and they won’t notice that they were fooled by the ones who plotted to rule over them until the tape is being put over their own mouths. When those confused souls show up on my cell block I’m going to snicker more than a little before I try to console them about our shared fate.
I commend Davis for trying, but I’m not optimistic that his effort will slow the speed of our civilizational descent, let alone stop or reverse it. This train is off the tracks. Nothing seems to explain reality anymore except fiction and nonsense. So I’ll leave you with the wisdom of Willy Wonka.
There is no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going. There’s no knowing where we’re rowing or which way the river’s flowing. Is it raining? Is it snowing? Is a hurricane a-blowing? Not a speck of light is showing so the danger must be growing. Are the fires of Hell a-glowing? Is the grizzly reaper mowing? Yes! The danger must be growing for the rowers keep on rowing and they’re certainly not showing any signs that they are slowing.
